The kids made lunch today. One of the things Catherine got for Christmas was a kid's cook book. Ever since then she's been itching to try making some of the stuff in her new book. Quinn didn't want to be left out, so the both of them made lunch for everyone today (with supervision of course). Today was Lemon-Lime soda and cheese sandwiches.
That's the 'soda'. The kids squeezed their own lemon and lime juice to make the soda for Ginger and myself. Then they added in some club soda to give it some fizz. And yes, it looks a bit like urine. You have to work past that when you drink it. And while we told the kids we loved it, it had quite the bitter kick to it. Let's just say that Sprite doesn't need to be too worried about the kids making any significant gains in their market share at this point. Truth be told, if they toned down the amount of lemon and lime, it probably wouldn't be too bad.
Next up, cheese sandwiches. There were merely tortilla with some cheese in the middle. Above you can see Ginger enjoying the one Catherine made for her (and her 'soda'). And in the picture below, you can see Quinn is actually eating his (it's a post Christmas miracle). There's several reasons he's doing this. One is he made the sandwich himself. Two is the amount of cheese he put on his entire sandwich was really small. If there was a tablespoon of cheese total I would be surprised, but the amount of cheese there isn't as important as the fact that he ate it know it was there, no matter how little. The last reason is Karen (of 3KDS&1DG) loaned us a brush that is suppose to help Quinn eat new stuff. I personally have my doubts as to whether the brush works on a scientific level, but on a psychological level it obviously does since he told us part of the reason he could eat the new sandwich was because of the brush. Behold the power of suggestion.
For dinner Catherine made the 'black drink' in her cookbook. This was suppose to be something akin to a Chocolate Banana Milk Shake Smoothie thing with banana, cocoa, and crushed ice and milk. That thing tasted bad. Quinn actually tried it twice (I was shocked). But I hear it got a lot better when Ginger put some Hershey's chocolate syrup into it. We rounded out the day after dinner by driving the kids around a couple of neighborhoods to see some Christmas lights and decorations before they're all put away in the next couple of days.
When I woke up this morning, everything was foggy. And while this stuff usually burns off by nine at the latest, today it was there until almost twelve at which point everything cleared up.
Quinn had a birthday party to attend today. It was at Pump It Up. Not a bad place for a party. The kids literally wear themselves out running around on all the blow up stuff. There are a couple of different rooms that you migrate through as the party progresses. Each room has three giant inflatable things. Both rooms have an obstacle course and a slide. The third item in one was a basketball court and in the other it was something akin to a circular race track. Quinn was entertained the entire time and seemed to have a ton of fun. And they have one rule for the slides that's basically don't go down head first. Guess who ended up doing that multiple times. Don't worry, as a responsible parental unit I made sure I told him not to do that (*cough* while the staff was watching *cough*).
This party also gave me my first real test of my new camera that I was given for Christmas by my Uncle Frank. The camera is a Nikon Coolpix S7c, and no, I didn't request it, he just bought what he thought was good. There are good and bad things about it. The good is it's slim. It can easily fit in my pocket so I no longer have to lug the huge D70 around if I want a camera with me when I'm out and about. The other good thing is the display. The display on this thing is freakin' huge. It's basically the entire back of the camera. The bad things are shutter lag. It's up there. Not quite a second in good light, but probably over half a second (I've noticed the lag gets worse as the lighting conditions get worse). Continuous shots aren't really continuous (I'm used to being able to do about 3 / sec on the D70, so anything more than 1 a second doesn't count as continuous as far as I'm concerned). And it doesn't seem to do well in low light high action shots (the shots I did take in those combined conditions seemed a bit grainy). Overall, it's a nice camera to be able to take along with me when I want a camera but don't want to deal with the size constraint of the D70, but it certainly won't be replacing my D70.
Nana left this morning. Nana had been here since 7:45 AM Christmas morning. And for some reason Nana thought she (Nana) wasn't being mentioned enough on the blog (not enough Nana references), so I thought I would take an moment to try and rectify the lack of Nana related information. Did I mention one of the Christmas presents I got from Ginger's parents was a 'Nana Nana Nana Nana Nana Nan...Batman' ornament.
Now that I've taken care of that, let's get back to whatever passes for normal around these parts. A while back when I was chatting with Buddy, he had this to say:Buddy: I hope everyone gets well soon...I missed the TV and movie posts instead of hearing about all the illnesses.
Way to jinx us Buddy. Everything was going good until a couple of days ago when Quinn started showing signs of a rash again, but this time on his chest and back. And instead of being the bigger blotches like last time, they were just a bunch of smaller dots this time. By yesterday they had already cleared up, but then his legs were showing signs of the rash. And by today even that's mostly gone. I'm wondering if it's my fault for not rinsing out the bathtub well enough from where I cleaned it before Christmas. Pretty sure I ended up using some bleach type cleaner. I was also pretty sure I did a thorough job rinsing it out, but now with this happening I've no longer as certain. We called the doctors and they once again dismissed it without even having him come in and just said it's probably some virus. Whatever it is it certainly doesn't seem to bother him at all since he doesn't appear to be scratching it or anything. Although strangely enough the day before the rash first appeared again we had another itchy foot incident during the night with him. Good news was this time it didn't keep him up or anything and he just called us in one time to complain about it before going back to sleep for the night. A couple days ago Ginger also got a sore throat which seems to have culminated yesterday with Ginger running a very mild temperature (under 100), but all that appears to be gone today (with only a lingering cough remaining). Maybe everyone will stay healthy now for a while (unless Buddy put the whammy jammy on us again).
Anyway, to fix the jonesing Buddy is having let's see what I can post TV / Movie related (which will invariably also be comic book related). There's this casting call notice that certainly looks like someone's trying to do a Green Lantern Corps series. From reading the casting call Hal Jordan isn't going to be the main character, but instead they're going to go with John Stewart as the main guy (possibly based on the fact that he was the Green Lantern in the recent Justice League and Justice League Unlimited cartoons that came out recently). That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned since I've never liked Hal Jordan as Green Lantern anyway. There was a teaser trailer for the Fantastic Four sequel released that I have to admit suddenly has me looking forward to the movie, if only for the Silver Surfer appearance. I seriously don't know how they did it, but they actually show the Surfer looking very much like I would expect, and it doesn't come across as being as cheesy as I would have expected. Finally, here's a pretty amusing seasonal greeting from some comic book related something or other. I found it to be pretty funny. Pretty sure this isn't a real comic or anything.
Today's fun image, Hershey's Kissables, their answer to M&M's.
We bought my Mom (Nana) a new computer for Christmas. I used to put them together myself, but I'm done with that. Her old one was one I put together for her years and years ago and it finally gave up the ghost a couple months ago (I think it was an AMD K6-300 if that gives you a clue as to how old it was). So I needed to transfer her old data to her new computer. To facilitate this I bought a USB external hard drive case at Best Buy earlier. Unfortunately I bought a 2.5 inch model instead of the 3.5 inch model I really needed (no jokes about size issues here please). Anyway, today Ginger's family headed home, and Ginger and Catherine went with them down to Potomac Mills to do some drive by shopping. So Quinn, Nana and myself had the place to ourselves. First we headed to the Post Office to finally mail out the Christmas cards that should have gone out last week (and would have had Ginger not gotten sick). From there we went to Silver Diner for lunch (much like Chic-Fil-A, Silver Diner is on the no fly list for restaurants Catherine cat eat at because they cook with peanuts, so Quinn can only go if Catherine isn't around). After lunch I decided to stop by CompUSA across the street because I still needed an external HD enclosure. Once I was in CompUSA I went back to the hard drive section and found the external enclosures. All of them were $45 to $50, which seemed a bit high to me. I had seen them online between $20 and $30, so I was expecting to pay between $30 and $40. Then I see a sign for a sale price of $25 for the CompUSA model. I'm thinking "Hook me up". But there's none to be found on the shelf where the sale sticker is. In fact, the product above the sale sign has a slew of enclosures with a different SKU number. An employee sees me and starts to try to walk away (great customer service there), but I manage to get her attention and drag her over. I mention I'm interested in the model listed as being on sale, but can't locate it on the shelf and was wondering if they have any in stock. She spends about two minutes looking at the shelf (because I can't possibly be right about it not being there, but I'm willing to cut her some slack on this, since stuff on shelves can get moved all over the place), then she wanders off and walks up to the front desk and then returns and tells me they're sold out. Now I watched her walk up there, and she never entered anything on the computer (she never even went behind the desk, she may have talked to someone, but I couldn't tell since she wasn't facing me). Plus she didn't even note the SKU number before she left. So I asked her if she actually checked the computer to see if they had them in stock and she responds with a "Uhh, yea, I did. We're out." She asks if I want to check on availability at another store, so I say yes even though I could care less (because at this point I've decided I'm certain that she's lying to me). As we're walking over to a computer to run the check, we pass this.
It's a whole freaking display of the items in question. There's like over a 100 of them. None in inventory, yea right. Must have been a computer glitch when she checked earlier. I guess the story does have a happy ending (not that kind of happy ending, come on, minds out of the gutters) since I actually got the item and as a bonus it was only $20 and not $25. And it worked too, I was able to successfully transfer all the documents from the old hard drive to her new computer. Sadly much of the rest of the night was spent installing tons of software and applying no fewer than 44 Windows high priority updates.
Random picture from Christmas day. We had candles floating in glasses during dinner for added ambiance.
I went and saw Eragon in the theaters today with JJ (my brother-in-law). Before you ask, the movie choice was his. Can't say I cared for the movie at all. It felt like someone plagiarized Star Wars and made a fantasy film from the formula. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced the movie plot runs almost identical to Star Wars, but with fantasy elements. The problem is it isn't anywhere as good as Star Wars (not that Star Wars was exceptionally good if you view it now objectively). The pacing of the movie is a bit too fast. Scenes are here and gone in a flash. Some scenes have way too much setup and exposition, while others things are introduced with nary an extra thought. And apparently now it's mandatory if you have a fantasy film that you show people traveling along the ridge top of a mountain (what's the last fantasy film that didn't have this scene somewhere in it). Mind you, these are people on the lam and trying to hide, so let's travel along the top of the mountain. And the movie itself just gets confused. I remember one scene where it's light out, then moments in the same scene it's night, and then suddenly it's dusk and now it's raining. And all this happens within five minutes real time which is condensed down to 30 seconds of film. I heard this is based off of a book. That fact probably explains a lot about why it's trying to cram so much info into the minuscule running time. And don't even get me started on all the cliches and mandatory imagery that's used throughout the film. It's like they built an entire story by jamming together cliches. And since it's based off a book series, that goes a long way towards explaining how the ending is merely setup for a sequel. The best part of the movie is Jeremy Iron's character. It's possible that since he's the only actor I recognize that he's just that much better an actor than everyone else in the cast. Not meaning to imply John Malkovich isn't a good actor or that I don't recognize his name, but in this movie he's relegated to maybe three bit scenes with probably less than a total of 10 speaking lines, and every scene is standard evil dictator type stuff.
The best thing about the Eragon movie was the trailer for Evan Almighty, which apparently is a sequel to Bruce Almighty that's going to star Steve Carell. And today I got to see the first image of the Silver Surfer from the Fantastic Four sequel. While I didn't like the first one, and doubt the second one will be much better, the eye candy for Silver Surfer looks very pretty.
Right, like we had any intention of going out shopping or anything today. Nope, not us. We stayed at home cleaned the house. Apparently Ginger thought after my week of being the primary adult / caregiver in the house it needed a proper cleaning before company arrived today. For some reason that minor task took a lot of time. Almost as if there was like a week's worth of cleaning (and then some) to accomplish. Since we're having everyone up tomorrow and the kids are going to go into present overload, we let them open two of the ones from us today (I say from "us", but other than pay for them I played no part in getting any of the kid's gifts). After that it was time to make some Christmas cookies. And shortly after that Grammy, Pop Pop, Grandmaw and JJ arrived and it was time for dinner. Dinner was a tad rushed since we were running late and needed to finish so that we could make it to the six o'clock service at church.
Hypothetically if you had a battle between Superman and the Hulk, who would win? Besides the fans that is. I'm guessing it would depend on the incarnation of Superman being used. If was the Superman from the 50s and 60s that could juggle planets, I would say Superman wins hands down. But if it's the Superman of the 80s that had all his powers downgraded, Hulk has a chance. And if it's the Superman from "Superman Returns" who apparently can only fly around and catch things or lift things, but not hit anything, then Hulk has a really good chance. My guess is it also depends on the version of the Hulk. The "Hulk Smash" version only has raw primal strength. Although primal Hulk's powers are a bit odd since he always says that "Madder Hulk Get, Stronger Hulk Get". In addition to not being intelligent enough to refer to himself without using third person apparently he can go into a berserker rage and increase his own strength. But, as you can clearly see here this is the Intelligent Hulk. How do I know. He's got a belt buckle. No way is the "Hulk Smash" version coherent enough to use a belt buckle. That and pants aren't purple. Ever wonder about those purple pants? First off, those pants have to have some serious stretch in them not to just rip off upon transformation. But if they didn't stretch Hulk would have quickly become an adult only comic every time he changed. Second, how many purple pants does Bruce Banner own? I'm thinking he must have picked up a ton of them when they were on a clearance rack at a deep discount or something (although where he stores them all is anyone's guess).
We made the tactical error of going out to eat for lunch today. Ginger's feeling a bit better and Quinn seems to be over whatever it was he had, couple that with the fact that we've been couped up for days now and it's easy to see why everyone was eager to get out for a bit. We went to Red Robin (not really shocking news for anyone that reads regularly). This was in the afternoon, around 2. And based on the limited amount of parking, I was sure the place was completely packed. Not so. Turns out everyone was apparently parking in the Red Robin parking lot and walking over to Best Buy. Let me just say this was an awesome trip to Red Robin today. Our waiter hooked Catherine up with extra melon for free, I got free fries with my soup order, then later the guy brought me out a bowl of the soup to go just because they had some extra in the back (free again!). Me likey! I made sure to give our waiter a fairly generous tip.
While Ginger and the kids were waiting on food to get prepared, I headed over to Best Buy to fight the crowds and get some stuff. The place was a madhouse. Completely packed. Lines stretching about 1/4 of the way around the store. But even so they had a ton of people manning the registers, so it probably only took me four minutes to get to a register.
Leaving after lunch was probably the hardest part of the trip. Traffic was backed up all along the various exit points, so it took a good while for us to be able to get out onto a road to go back home.
It was another warm day (temperature was in the mid 60s). So once we got home I let the kids play outside for a bit while Ginger went inside to rest. They even got out their bikes and rode them around the cul-de-sac (that is after we pumped up their tires since none of the wheels had any air pressure at all). Everything was going good until Catherine got off her bike and tripped while running along and ended up skinning up her hand and knee. That incident pretty much put the kibosh on playing outside. And I feel obligated to mention that Quinn was very helpful and brought in all the toys both kids were playing with (without fussing) so I could attend to Catherine. Evidently he can be a pretty good kid sometimes.
Once the kids were down for the night, I headed out to do some Christmas shopping. Since Ginger would be able to check on them if there was an issue, that freed me up. I didn't actually leave the house until about nine-thirty, but let me just say that late night shopping is where it's at. Crowds are practically non-existent. I managed to get to three stores, and then stopped by work for a bit to see how bad it was going to be after missing four days (it's not too bad, only about 250 emails).
Today's ornament is a two for one. A couple of my favorite cartoon characters, Pinky and the Brain.
Boba Fett. Arguably the coolest character in the original Star Wars trilogy. And seen here in what has to be one of the worst possible poses they could possibly create for an ornament. What's with that weak pistol weapon he's carrying? In the movie you usually saw him carting around a shotgun type blaster that required two hands to hold and aim. Now that's a real weapon. And don't get me started on Lucas' assassination job of replacing all the lines of Boba Fett in the original trilogy with that lines by the guy they got to play Jango Fett in the prequels. And speaking of which, I liked the backstory he had prior to Lucas butchering the character and making him a clone in the prequels. In fact, in my little corner of the world, we just pretend that Episodes I, II and III never existed.
I saw it! I had thought it was only an urban legend. A story people told to frighten visitors in our home. But lo and behold, it's true. She exists! I saw Ginger walking around, she was up and about twice today. For about an hour each time.
Quinn's looking a lot better now. Almost all his scabs are gone now. Ginger also appeared to be feeling a bit better. She said she no longer has a fever, but she still wasn't feeling great so we only saw her a couple of times and the rest of the day she was resting and recuperating. Who knows, I may even end up getting into work tomorrow, but based on how run down she appeared to be tonight, I doubt it.
Today was a long day. And by that I mean it felt really long. And it wasn't just because the kids got up at around 7:15 AM, but that really didn't help since I had been up till almost 3 watching "24" Season 5 Disc 2 in hopes of being able to return it and get disc 3 by Saturday (how much you want to bet after all that it doesn't get here). And it wasn't long just because the kids didn't get to bed until almost 9 PM and didn't nap any during the day, but that's certainly part of it. No, today was also cold and damp. And it had rained last night, so going outside today really wasn't an option. So today was a long day indoors.
The above is during one of the brief periods where Ginger was out and about and Quinn decided to take some photos of the family. And as the day dragged on (and on, and on), I taught the kids how to play the card game War to kill some time. I had forgotten how long a game that can end up being. It's like the Risk of card games, but without the strategy. I got knocked out second round, but Quinn and Catherine just kept playing for a really long time. Catherine didn't care about winning so much as she did about having the Queens. Losing an Ace or a King didn't upset her, but man did she get upset if Quinn took one of her Queens. I assume it's related to the whole princess fixation thing, but who knows.
And finally to end things, here's one of my favorite ornaments on the tree.
Ginger still feels (and looks actually) like death warmed over. So that meant another day of me staying home and watching the kids. Which means everyone is in their pajamas till noon (or later)! Ginger thinks she may have Strep Throat (she decided this late tonight after it was too late for us to do anything about it), so if she's still feeling bad tomorrow, the plan is to visit a Doc in a Box.
Quinn's rash is almost completely gone. The scabs from some of the rashes that got a bit more severe are still there, but overall I would say he's looking pretty good all things considered. And we haven't had any more problems with the medicine. Although tonight I forgot to give it to him before dinner and was worried about him possibly throwing up with a full stomach. I don't know if he was just teasing me or what, but there was a second there where he put his hand over his mouth after he took a big swig of the medicine and I really thought things were going to turn ugly for a second.
Based on a conversation between the kids at lunch, I'm starting to think that while they may not appear to listen to what we say, the kids do actually hear us.Catherine burps several times very loudly (I have no idea where she learned this 'obnoxious' trait from, and if anyone asks me I'm pleading the 5th).
Quinn: Catherine, you're not even funny. That's not polite.
Catherine: Now Quinn, just calm down.
Quinn: Catherine, you're not a Mommy or a Daddy, you can't tell me what to do like that.
Why's this amusing? Ginger and I utter these exact lines (in response to the same things) during dinners.
Even though it was a bit chilly, I managed to take the kids outside to play for about an hour this afternoon. I feel pretty strongly that the kids tend to do better when they can go outside and play some. Not sure exactly why that it, but it just seems that way (it could be it just breaks up the monotony of inside play, but whatever the reason, I believe it has a positive effect). There was one incident though that happened while we were outside. Catherine was holding up a ring and wanted me to throw a nerf football through it. So I tried and ended up beaming her right in the side of the face. She was pretty upset, but eventually she calmed down. I don't think there's any bruising or permanent damage, so i lucked out. I ended up beaming Quinn in the side of the head not even five minutes later, but luckily he had his football helmet on so it didn't really bother him.
And finally, the visible consequence of Dad staying home and watching the kids? There nowhere near as much focus on cleaning up as there is with Mom. Actually, I'm dreading when Ginger does feel better, because she's going to get on all of our cases and make us clean house (she's basically said as much after looking at the family room).
So far I must say I'm not impressed with the new Blogger. Particularly the data management aspect. And I'm talking about photos in particular. Before the new system all photos requested their data from what appeared to be the same server and the requested image was returned, but now there are about four server references (bp{0-3}.blogger.com) that can get randomly assigned, which then redirect you to other servers where the picture is actually stored. Plus, the server storage is just as likely to be offline and not return anything as it is to actually work. I've been seeing lots and lots of empty frames where pictures should be on blogspot blogs these days from where the server simply doesn't or fails to load the requested picture (I'm hoping his aspect is temporary though as they work out bugs in the new system).
And the new system they have to store your uploaded pictures is simply nuts. When you upload a picture these days you appear to be randomly assigned one of these "bp" servers with a link to your picture. Let's take an example picture. Below is a concept picture I took trying to duplicate the effect in a picture Ben showed me of the national Christmas tree. Although in the shot Ben showed me the camera must have been mounted better because the light lines look flat and aren't shaky like they are in mine (I got the shakes real bad apparently).
Now let's really start looking at what's going on behind the scenes here. If you click on the above picture, it takes you to a new URL location. If you examine the entire URL it would appear that you've now gotten to a file that ends with ".jpg". Here's the kicker though, notice that the image itself at this point is probably too big to view on the screen at once and you have to scroll around to see it all (those of you running your browser full screen at 1600x1200 will just have to trust me on this one). Normally IE and Firefox have little quick clicks that allow you to switch between the maximized image and the 'fit on the screen' image. Not so here. To make things even stranger, look at the page source. The ".jpg" file actually returned html code that has now directed you to another server entirely to actually get to the picture (the URL says you're going to "bp0.blogger.com", but the internal html points to "lh3.google.com" (at least that's where it pointed when I checked, it's possible that pointing part is dynamic and changes on subsequent loads, but I haven't looked into it closely enough to know whether that's the case yet).
If you go to the location pointed to by "lh3.google.com", you'll see it actually returns an image file at this point. So it looks like they're pointing to a server farm, which in turn points to another server farm where the picture actually lives. It gets better, in that first URL (the "bp0.blogger.com" one), try changing bp0 to bp1, bp2, and bp3. They all seem to work and return the same html code. You can do the same thing for the "lh3.google.com" URL, but there lh0 through lh2 don't seem to work. But lo and behold if you replace lh3 with lh4, lh5 and lh6 it all returns the actual picture. So at this point I was thinking, they've got a two sets of aliased server names where each set points to a particular file system. But then almost by accident I found another interesting tidbit when I was looking at this with Barry the other day. I was at the bp0.blogger.com URL and if you compare the "bp" URL with the "lh" URL, you'll notice the URL looks very similar except for in the "bp" URL one directory name has "s1600-h" while in the "lh" URL it's simply "s1600". So guess what happens on the "bp" URL if you remove the "-h". That's right, it simply loads the image. The reverse is true also. If you load the lh URL and get the image, then add a "-h" to the end of the "s1600" directory then it will redirect you to loading that html source again. So all these servers are pointing to the same file system (which somewhat verified if you examine the results of running dig on the servers, they all resolve to the same address). Why blogger is suddenly giving you html code to view images, I have no idea. I will say I don't like the way it's currently working. For the most part I didn't see the problem, because I always shrink my images down to around 800 pixels before I upload them, and because of that I hadn't see the non-resizing issue when you view a picture through blogger. What I really don't understand is the why. It seems like by having the "bp" servers return html which then has the "lh" server return the image you're actually making more requests across the network than you were before (and since they appear to be resolving to the same server filesystem, they're increasing the load on that file system). And because all the servers appear to be working within the same filesystem and session information, I don't really see the point of the extra layers.
My current guess is this has something to do with merging Blogger with Picasa's Web Album photo storage. I say this because last night to upload pictures I suddenly had to agree to new terms of service (update 12/13/2006) for using images with Blogger. If you follow the link about what this new terms of service it, it takes you to the terms of service for Picasa's Web Albums. This makes me wonder if there will suddenly be a limit of 250 MB on pictures you can upload (since I believe that's the currently limit for Picasa Web Albums). If anyone knows why they changed it to this new method, I love to hear some theories.
I give up. At this point I can no longer foresee a time in the future where everyone in this house will be well at the same time. Today Ginger's sick with flu like symptoms. I suspect she got it on Sunday when she had nursery duty at church. From what I've seen even though the church nursery rules state you aren't suppose to drop your child off if they're sick, a lot of people seem to ignore that rule. So because of that I got to stay home and watch the kids today while Ginger rested (she did seem better for like two hours just before noon, but then I think she did too much and relapsed hard after lunch). This is really putting crimp in my plans since I still have to come up with something to get Ginger for Christmas and I'm quickly running out of time.
On the one bit of positive news for the day, Quinn's rash is looking a bit better. The above picture was taken just after lunch, and I think it looked even better as the day went on (although maybe I'm just getting used to it and it looks as bad as it did before). I was pretty excited that I was able to get him to take his medicine this morning and this evening without a throw up incident. No more mixing it with stuff, I'm just giving it to him straight and then giving him some orange juice as a chaser in addition to some bread or cereal. So far, so good.
Since we were couped up inside of most of the day, we decided the kids could open some Christmas presents they had gotten from Ken, Karen and Amanda. Evidently they think Catherine doesn't have enough Barbie stuff yet since I think every present Catherine got was Barbie something or other. Don't get me wrong, Catherine loved all of it and insisted on taking it out and starting to play with it right then. Quinn liked his stuff too, and eventually I had to go outside with him for a bit so he could play some with his stuff. Wish it was been in the low 70s today like it was yesterday instead of the low 50s.
Those splotches on Quinn's face still hadn't cleared up today, so Ginger took him into the doctor's office (actually she just called to ask about what it might be and they set up an appointment for him to come in that day). If you want to see what the splotches look like and aren't overly squeamish, click here. Turns out that the Doctor diagnosed it as a staph infection. They didn't run any tests or anything, so I don't know if they're 100% sure that's what it is, but they did give him some antibiotics he has to take.
Hopefully tomorrow he will actually take the antibiotics since tonight we mixed it in with some orange juice and after two hours of nursing it and almost finishing it, he threw it back up. Here's the kicker, the reason we mixed it with the orange juice was we were afraid he would throw it up if we just gave it to him. Since he nursed it for two hours though, I'm hoping some of the stuff made it into his system. The docs said that he might be better by Friday if the medicine works as they hope (and he actually takes it). Here's hoping the infection isn't one of the antibiotic resistant strands of the virus and he gets better, otherwise since it's a highly contagious thing we'll have to cancel people coming up for Christmas.
Well, both kids are still a bit under the weather. Quinn seems to be okay, but has some rash or something on his face, so he's obviously not completely better. Catherine was coughing some this morning, but seemed better once she was up and around for a bit. All that meant there was no way they were going to church. Ginger still had to go to church though since she had nursery duty (heh, I said duty) and Grammy (our babysitter for the party from last night) left early to get home before noon. Once Ginger got back home and we had some lunch, we headed out and bought a Christmas tree. I know I complained about tree prices last year, but this year we decided to wait until they went on sale (30% off). And somehow, our tree still cost more than it did last year. Prices on trees are absolutely nuts. I know I'm entering "grumpy old man" territory by going down this path, but I have fond memories of getting a tree back when I was a youngster and only paying about $12 to $15 for it.
The weather was unbelievable for mid December. You could walk around without a coat or anything. Once we were at the lot, the kids went nuts running through the trees. Catherine was just precious as almost every tree she saw she would say "Let's get this tree. It's perfect." Meanwhile after about 20 minutes of looking around Quinn was saying "Let's just buy a tree and go home." I think part of that is simply because even though Quinn doesn't really appear to be sick, he's still in recovery mode and tends to not have as much patience as he normally does when he's not feeling 100 percent (not that he has a lot of patience normally).
Anyway, I have lots and lots of pictures of the events, so why don't I just let those tell the story.
And I'm sure Ginger's tired of hearing me gripe about it, but look at all the ornaments on the tree! That's only about a little more than half the ornaments we had to put up. We still have a ton more than need to go on the tree. And it doesn't help that every year we buy more. I'm a big part of the problem though since I tend to buy a fair number of ornaments at Hallmark after Christmas when they're 50 to 75 percent off.
